Day April 15, 2007

Last year I was at Microsoft before moving north and heading back to graduate school, and much of what I worked on hadn’t yet been announced (some still hasn’t been). But recently one of the projects was announced by both parties, so I can mention my involvement. Microsoft has licensed EMC Smarts network management and root-cause analysis technology to integrate with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (formerly known as “MOM”). I worked on Vij Rajarajan’s team and was part of a 3-4 person task force negotiating the deal with EMC. I’m very excited to see it announced and moving forward.

I’m particularly excited because I think both technologies are strong and are architecturally an excellent match. SCOM 2007 is very flexible model-based management technology, and EMC Smarts is the best of the “new generation” network management systems that inherently model root-cause and network causality. The merger of the two, along with injections of SDM/SML model technology and additional vendor-specific models written by equipment vendors will create a very strong management solution that finally will do more than “ring the alarm” when a symptom occurs. Model-based management has been in the works for years, and in our own way at Network Clarity we attempted to do MBM for network configuration and optimization, but the latter is an even harder challenge to do well in some ways.

So congratulations to Rich, Vij, Shawn, Christian, Ashvin, and others on announcing this deal and making the strategy a reality!